


Life Afterlife

by amberswansong



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:18:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberswansong/pseuds/amberswansong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the opera, Shilo tries to pick up the pieces of her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Afterlife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trickseybird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trickseybird/gifts).



It’s late morning, and I’m tracing patterns in the mist on the window, watching the drizzling rain and listening to Graverobber snore.  I should be asleep, too, but I haven’t been able to sleep as much since I stopped taking my medicine.

The car pulls up at the gate, and for a moment I think ( _hopewishpray_ ) it’s Mag, even though that’s impossible.  I recognize the woman with the gun – or at least her uniform – and then the person she’s escorting gets out of the car, and I’m scampering downstairs, pulling the bedroom door shut behind me so her voice doesn’t wake him.  I don’t know what’s between them; he won’t talk and she doesn’t talk about anything of substance – but there’s something there ( _Amber Sweet is addicted to the/Graverobber, Graverobber, sometimes I wonder why_ ), glass shards strewn around the floor of our interactions, and I don’t really want either of them to discover the other in my house.

“I brought the test results,” she tells me, with a camera-ready smile.  “It’s good news.”

“Great,” I say, smiling back, waiting.  I don’t know why she’s come herself, instead of sending for me, or sending a messenger.  I was a pawn for her father; why do I matter to her?  What does she want from me?

She lays the clear plastic printouts out on the kitchen table, tapping individual readouts with a long scarlet nail.  “There’s very little permanent damage, and what there is, can be repaired or replaced with minimal difficulty.  I’ll give Nathan this much credit: you’re in amazingly good health overall for someone who’s been systematically poisoned for the past seventeen years.”

I never know how to respond to that.  Yes, the “medicine” Dad had been giving me was poisoned, and the blood disease was mostly manufactured.  But he was only doing it because he loved me, to keep me safe, and I believe that, even if nobody else does.  “He was a good doctor,” I say, realizing how inane it sounds as the words leave my mouth.

She gives me a measured look.  “Yes, he was.”

“What’s this going to cost me?” I ask, frowning at the list of recommended procedures and thinking about Repo men ( _Dad_ ) in the darkness.

“You?  Nothing.”  She smiles again, that bright press-release smile, nothing showing behind her designer eyes.  I wonder if she has the same kind of eyes that Mag did.

“Graverobber says nothing’s free in this world, especially not from GeneCo.”

“Of course he does.  But we don’t have to live in his world, sweetie.  In my world, the company’s covering it; you’re the minor child of an employee.”

“Ex-employee.  Dad’s…not working for GeneCo any more.”  ( _Blood on the stage, so much blood, his hand slipping from my cheek, and the emptiness that still aches; half-a-dozen GeneCo employees have encouraged me to move out, somewhere smaller, newer, but how can I leave him behind?_ )

“We have an excellent death benefits package.  It’s one of the ways Dad kept employees.”  She sighs, drumming her nails on the table.  “It’s coming out of the malpractice budget; it technically counts as employee malfeasance.  Or something.  Accounting and legal worked out the details.  What it boils down to is that it won’t cost you a thing.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this?  Why do you even care?”  Graverobber had asked me that when I told him that Miss Sweet had been stopping in, making sure I had groceries, sending people over to tell me about Dad’s life insurance policy and teaching me how to pay bills.  How to live without him.

“Somebody has to.  GeneCo’s staggered along long enough, fueled by Rotti Largo’s paranoia and revenge.  It’s time to – change things.  For the better.”  She looks serious, like she means it.  “Starting with you.”

“Thank you, then.”  And now the sort-of-awkward silence, which will be broken by her asking polite questions about my plans for the future that I don’t know how to answer.  She says she doesn’t want to pressure me, and I think she’s just being friendly, but I just don’t _know_ what I want to do with my life, now that doing something is an actual possibility.

Then I hear the footsteps in the upstairs hallway, and her head snaps up and why is there never a convenient hole in the floor to swallow you when you really want one?  She looks at me and the shiny corporate mouthpiece is gone, but she’s not replaced by the pushy bitch from the alley that I’m afraid of.  She is still, brittle, somewhere far away.  “He’s here, isn’t he,” she says, and her voice has dropped almost an octave and turned deadly serious.

“Yes?” I answer, because I think she’s talking about Graverobber, but I’ve never seen her like this.

She looks at me again, and then up at the ceiling where his footsteps stopped, and she is holding something back under her still, brittle expression, gathering up the printouts without looking at them.  “You can call me when you’re ready to get started on the procedures,” she says, snapping them into a neat pile and leaving them there on the table.

“Okay.”

She’s heading for the door now, sharp staccato heels echoing his heavier footsteps, and I realize that she had to have recognized his _step,_ somehow she knows him well enough that she can recognize him just by hearing him walk, and I get that feeling of lurking glass again, but it’s like I’ve been surrounded by it and it’s all razor-sharp.  One of the guards opens the door for her, and she stops, just on the threshold, and turns to me.  “Shilo,” she says, and what I see is pain that’s unexpectedly deep for facile Miss Sweet, and sorrow, and she says in a voice so low I barely hear it, “Shilo, don’t let him break you.”

And she’s gone.

The door closes and the car pulls away, and only then does he come downstairs.  “Graverobber,” I say to him, as seriously as I can manage, “what the hell is going on between you and Amber Sweet?”

He smirks at me, but it seems empty.  “Not a thing, kid.  Not a thing.”

I open my mouth to argue with him, but he kisses me, and I have a moment of understanding that he’s trying to distract me before it works.  This thing between us is still new; being touched by someone other than my father ( _not like this, never like this, but I always felt love in his touch and sometimes I wished there was more, always my mother, my mother, I could be my mother again for him_ ) is still new and thrilling, and he slips my shirt over my head right here in the kitchen, mouth on one breast, hand on the other.  I’m still thin and flat-chested, but he doesn’t seem to care; sometimes he tells me that I’m beautiful and I don’t know whether to believe him.

The first time was the night after the opera, fear and shock and horror crumbling together into his arms, heaving sobs onto his shoulder, and he brought me back here and put me in the bath, washing the blood out of my wig in the sink while I scrubbed myself as hard as I could until the hot water ran out.  He wrapped me in a towel and I kissed him.  It was supposed to be a chaste kiss, of the sort I’d given Dad when he did the same thing, but… it didn’t stay that way.

It didn’t stay that way at all, and we stumbled down the hallway and into my room, through the plastic curtains onto my bed.  “Jesus, kid,” he whispered, and I had no idea what I was doing but it didn’t seem to matter.

In the morning, he pulled the curtains down.  We piled them in Dad’s room.  Graverobber arched an eyebrow in invitation at his bed, but that seemed like sacrilege, somehow.  I dragged him back to my room, instead.

That was three weeks ago.  Now we stumble to the bed instead of watching Amber's car pull away. His hands are on my hips, insistent. I should wonder if he's thinking about me but I don't really care. This isn't pity or charity, this is- maybe not love, but agency. My choice to put my hands on him, my choice to tug at his clothes.  This is life, complicated and messy and very, very real.  He is everything my father tried to shield me from my whole life, and I love it.  Maybe I love him.  I’m not sure.  I don’t know that it matters, right now.

What matters is that I’m still alive. And I’m living.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much to my beta, who kept my sanity intact and made sure I could finish!


End file.
